The Quickening eBook

“What can I say to help you, Tom? God knows
I would do anything that a true friend may do!”

He freed himself of the touch of her hands, but very
gently.

“There might have been a thing; but you have
made it impossible. No, don’t freeze me
again—­it’s the last time. If
I could have won your love ... but what is the use
of trying to put it in words; you know—­you
have always known. And now it is too late.”

For a single instant Vincent Farley’s chance
of marrying the Deer Trace coal lands trembled in
the balance. Ardea forgot him, forgot Nan, thought
of nothing but the passionate yearning that was drawing
her like gripping hands toward the man who had bared
his inmost heart to her. Again she leaned on
him with a touch so light that he scarcely felt it,
and her lips brushed his forehead.

“It is not too late for you to be a man, noble,
upright, honorable. Let the world find that for
which it is looking, my friend—­my brother:
the strong man armed who can stand where others faint
and fall. Oh, I wish I knew how to say the word
that would make you the man you were meant to be!”

When it was said, she was gone and the sound of the
closing door was in his ears when he turned and went
slowly down the driveway and out on the white pike,
lying like a snowy ribbon under the December stars.
On the highway he hung undecided for a moment; but
an hour later, William Layne, driving homeward from
South Tredegar, overtook him plodding slowly southward
far beyond the head of Paradise; and it was nearing
midnight when he won back, pacing steadily past the
Deer Trace and Woodlawn gates and holding his way
down the pike to Gordonia.

The railway station was his goal; and when he had
aroused the sleepy night operator and gained admittance,
he sat at the telegraph table to write a message.
It was to Norman, addressed to intercept the salesman
at the breakfast stop.

“Cancel Pennsylvania date and come in at once
to take managership of plant,” was the wording
of it; and at the breakfast-table the following morning
Tom announced his intention of leaving the industrial
plow in the furrow while he should go to Boston to
complete his course in the technical school.

XXVI

AS WITH A MANTLE

The month of March in the great, southward-reaching
bight of the Tennessee River is the pattern and form
of fickleness climatic. Normally it is the time
of starting sap and swelling buds and steaming leaf
beds odorous of spring; the month when the migratory
crows wing their flight northward, and Nature, lightest
of winter sleepers in the azurine latitudes, stirs
to her vernal awakening. None the less, in the
Tennessee March the orchardist, watching the high-blown
clouds in skies of the softest blue, is glad if the
peach buds are slow in responding to the touch of
the wooing airs, or, chewing a black birch twig as